I’m A Winner! And A Loser!

Thank you to my fellow bloggers; I won the Is Everyone An Idiot But Me Blog Hop last week! This time I came in 1st place, handily beating all the other competition. And by “all the other competition” I mean one other, really good, entry. I accepted the award on behalf of my minions, all of my adoring fans around the world. Ahh, the applause is still echoing in my ears.

This award is extra special for me because in general, everyone is an idiot but me. Except when I’m being an idiot. For example, apparently I don’t know how to navigate a convenience store anymore. I discovered this when I ventured into a Sheetz, an emporium of low price gas and gourmet treats. I wasn’t sure they had any food I would eat, I just wanted to take a look around, see what they were offering. But I couldn’t find a menu anywhere. Nor did I see prepared food on display. Nor did there appear to be a counter with a helpful teenager taking orders. Nor did I use the word nor too many times in the same paragraph.

Anyway, I did what anyone would do in this situation-put my head down and got the hell out of there. I told Dan I wasn’t going back in because I didn’t know how to find the food. I am not a hunter or a gatherer. I’m more of a wait-in-the-car-until-someone-brings-you-food species. But Dan assured me that he could show me how to find the food, and he pointed me in the right direction.

It turns out that Sheetz has these little kiosks, with pretty pictures of food. I didn’t know if I was supposed to touch it or talk to it or what. I was feeling really old and confused. I figured touching the kiosk would be less obvious than talking to it, so I tried that first. Victory! It was a touch screen after all; something an ordinary toddler could figure out. And I wished there was an ordinary toddler in the vicinity who could show me how to move beyond the first page of the menu.

I tried swiping my finger across the screen, first horizontally and then vertically. I tried swiping my whole hand across the screen. Nothing. In an act of sheer desperation I tried to focus my mind on moving to the next page of the menu, thinking maybe it operated on instructions transmitted directly from my brain. Yep, not only was I an idiot, I was a crazy idiot. In fairness, now that we have machines that follow voice commands and people routinely talk to inanimate objects, it’s not much of a leap to the aluminum foil hat.

The bottom line is I left empty-handed. Even though some kind of delicious-looking iced coffee type thing was on sale for $2 for the mega-size, and I really wanted one.

I understand a lot of young people are worried about finding jobs, and I can see why. Hang tough though kids, because people like me are going to have to hire people like you to act as our intermediary with the technology that replaced you to begin with. I can only pay minimum wage…but you can have all the iced coffee you can figure out how to buy.